Monday, April 20, 2009

Power line petition a waste of time

The UKQRM Save Shortwave petition which asked the Prime Minister of the UK to immediately ban powerline network adapters of the type currently being used by the UK's biggest telecoms provider has predictably met with an official brush-off. You can read the petition, and the official response, here.

I initially refused to sign the petition, which earned me a lot of sniffy emails (pun intended) from some people who thought I was a traitor to the cause and deserved to suffer QRM. But I really didn't expect that officialdom would take any notice of a campaign that was amateur in every sense of the word, and whose home page was "mikeandsniffy.co.uk". An amateur campaign could all too easily get us dismissed as a bunch of cranks, which would do our case no good at all. In the end, I did sign, since I didn't think it would do any harm, which is why I received an email informing me of the outcome today.

If there is any hope of getting any action at all on this serious issue, it will be achieved through professional legal and technical representation which our national society, the RSGB, can and is doing. That's what I believed at the time, and that is what I still believe.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Not an unusual outcome to a No10 petition Julian.

Hopefully this cludgy technology will run its course & wither, or be successfully challenged by RSGB et al.

BTs TV service doesn't exactly sell the WIFI Homehub dream very well with its ha-uge power adaptors & ethernet cables!

Out of interest, I remember reading on your site a while back that you were having a serious interference problem - possibly upto 12 months ago. Was the cause down to one of these power line adaptors???

Unknown said...

No, the interference I get here, which is like a constant arcing sound over a band that extends to above 21MHz and is S7 - S9, is not characteristic of power line adapters. I have no idea what it is.